Editing Laogai (section)

=== Food ===
Food distribution has varied much through time, similar to its variation across the "over 1,155 documented laogai" camps.<ref name=chapman>Chapman, Michael. "Chinese slaves make goods for American malls", .  ''Human Events,'' 07/04/97, Vol. 53, Issue 25.</ref> One camp near Beijing distributes between 13.5 and 22.5&nbsp;kg of food per person per month. This is about average. The food consists of sorghum and corn, which are ground into flour and made into bread or gruel. The prisoners of the [[Beijing]] camp also receive 3 ounces of cooking oil per month. Every 2 weeks, the prisoners receive "a special meal of pork broth soup and white-flour steamed buns". Important Chinese holidays, such as New Year's, National Day, and the Spring Festival, are celebrated with meat dumplings, an exception in an otherwise meatless diet.<ref name=wu/>

Food is distributed by one person per squad, which consists of about 10 people. This prisoner, called the ''zhiban'' or "duty prisoner," delivers the food to the rest of his group in large bowls on a cart. This often involves pushing the cart a great distance to the place where the others are working.<ref name=wu/> Each day prisoners receive gruel, bread, and a watery [[vegetable soup]] made from the cheapest vegetables available. Some camps have reported two meals a day, while others allow three.<ref name=williams /><ref name=wu/> Food is rationed according to rank and productive output, which is believed to provide motivation to work.

During the Mao era, food in prisons was very scarce, not only because of a nationwide [[famine]] during the [[Great Leap Forward]] (1959–1962), but also because of the harsher rules{{Clarify|date=August 2014}}. Since little food was available, prisoners would scavenge anything they came across while working. Cases were documented of prisoners eating "field mice, crickets, locusts, toads, grapevine worms, grasshoppers, insect larvae and eggs, and venomous snakes".<ref name=williams /> Also, many inmates would steal produce from the fields they worked on, smuggling vegetables back to their barracks. In [[Jiabiangou]], [[Gansu]], around 2,500 out of 3,000 prisoners died of starvation between 1960 and 1962, with some survivors resorting to [[Human cannibalism|cannibalism]].<ref name=french2009>[https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/books/25french.html Howard W. French, "Survivors' Stories From China"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170301204421/http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/books/25french.html |date=March 1, 2017 }}, ''New York Times,'' August 25, 2009</ref>

Nutrition in the camps was a big problem, especially during the early 1950s through the 1960s, in the early years of the PRC (People's Republic of China). Before the CCP ([[Chinese Communist Party]]) took control, hunger was rarely used to control prisoners.<ref name=williams /> Early leaders of the CCP realized the power of withholding food from rebellious prisoners and, until recently, this practice was very common. Since the early 1990s, some camps in the coastal regions of Eastern China have improved the quality and amount of food.<ref name=williams />